Wireless communication systems are widely spread all over the world to provide various types of communication services such as voice or data. In general, the wireless communication system is a multiple access system capable of supporting communication with multiple users by sharing available system resources (e.g., bandwidth, transmission power, etc.). Examples of the multiple access system include a code division multiple access (CDMA) system, a frequency division multiple access (FDMA) system, a time division multiple access (TDMA) system, an orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) system, a single carrier frequency division multiple access (SC-FDMA) system, etc.
While having almost the same complexity with the OFDMA, SC-FDMA has a lower peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) due to a single carrier property. Since the low PAPR is advantageous for a user equipment (UE) in terms of transmission power efficiency, the SC-FDMA is adopted for uplink transmission in a 3rd generation partnership project (3GPP) long term evolution (LTE) as disclosed in section 5 of 3GPP TS 36.211 V8.0.0 (2007 September) “Technical Specification Group Radio Access Network; Evolved Universal Terrestrial Radio Access (E-UTRA); Physical channels and modulation (Release 8)”.
Meanwhile, a variety of uplink control information is transmitted through an uplink control channel. Examples of the uplink control information include acknowledgement (ACK)/not-acknowledgement (NACK) for performing hybrid automatic repeat request (HARM), a channel quality indicator (CQI) indicating downlink channel quality, a scheduling request (SR) requesting resource allocation for uplink transmission, etc.
Occurrence of errors during the transfer of the uplink control information may cause performance deterioration of the entire wireless communication system. Thus, it is necessary to transmit the uplink control information with high reliability. Accordingly, there is a need for a method capable of effectively transmitting uplink control information to improve system performance.